Third-Party Controller Fixes 360's D-pad By Eliminating It

We get a lot of press releases here at Game Informer, most of which are kind of awful. No, we're not interested in buying an island home with a 40-car garage. No, we're not interested in interviewing Snooki. Yes, we want to impress the ladies, but no, not by ingesting mysterious pills sold by someone who thinks numbers can be used interchangeably in words. Anyway, that's why we're especially happy to get things that are cool (and game related) in our inboxes.

Evil Controllers has devised a workaround to the dreaded Xbox 360 d-pad, which could be interesting to a lot of people. Unlike the original pad, which is a mushy mess (or the redesigned one, which is merely an elevated mushy mess), Evil's solution is to do away with the d-pad entirely and replace it with four discrete buttons. It's a little like the N64's c-button cluster, only these are bigger and are on the left side.

Evil says this eliminates accidental directional presses, is more accessible to disabled gamers, and will impress your friends. It's certainly more expensive than stock controllers ($55 for wired versions and $75 for wireless), but it could prevent a lot of headaches.

It's almost enough to make us forget that these are the same guys behind this kind of stuff...